Alpha Mind Blog

People get just plain crazy around the famous. Especially the famous-and-opinionated. Around, say, that guy who writes Scripting News.

Today Winer’s explaining why he deletes some comments from his blog. And my question is: Why should he even have to defend himself?

His blog is his. Period. He can shut it down if he wants. He can erase the whole thing. As I can do with mine, as you can do with yours.

The reason he’s defending himself is that the same trolls who leave the vacuous-nasty comments he deletes will also go elsewhere on the web and say the same vacuous-nasty things about him there, except that elsewhere they have the added ammunition that “Winer deletes comments Mommy, make him stop!”

Damning Scoble by faint praise of Winer

Some vacuous-nasty stuff can be pretty nicely dressed up as thoughtful commentary.

Submitted in evidence, this post, seemingly in sincere praise of Winer, but primarily effective as a knock on Scoble. The post (to which Scoble’s reply in the comments pretty well nails the matter), would be in the running for lamest blog post of November, except that the author realized the lameness of his communication and was big enough to apologize for it.

But still, what was said was said, and it was lame as all get out. The post didn’t just knock Scoble, but did so on truly laughable grounds. The message was that Scoble doesn’t do that which, as far as I can tell, Scoble absolutely lives to do: find new cool things and people, and bring them to the attention of others. And he does it pretty effectively. If anything, he overdoes it—when he’s at his hottest, reading Scobleizer + his link blog is like drinking from two fire hoses.

Both Dave and Robert have done things I’ve questioned. I’ve complained about one of Winer’s behaviors publicly (I know: to say that blogging here is public is something of a stretch. But it wasn’t here, it was on the For Immediate Release podcast.)

But I’ve never seen him really disrespectful of anybody who hadn’t earned it. And I’ve never seem him try to disappear anybody who was offering substance, even in disagreement, and who was truly willing to own his/her words.

BTW, the reason this topic exists at all is that Dave is trying out a new commenting tool on Scripting News, and he wasn’t 24 hours into the trial before he had an obnoxious troll. He may have had more since, and deleted them while I was looking the other way.

PS. I’m trying out a different commenting tool here from what Dave’s trying out there. By all means leave me a comment and check out Intense Debate.

PPS. I’ve never done a post about both Winer and Scoble before, but I’ve wanted to. I was appreciating DaveNet when Radio Userland wasn’t even a gleam in his eye. I sometimes wish he’d go back to doing longer, Davenet-style essays. And one of the reasons Dave is cool is that he gave us Robert, who would be doing heaven-knows-what if he hadn’t done marketing for Userland.

PPPS. I mentioned longer, DaveNet-style essays. But my all-time favorite wasn’t very long at all.

Okay, so I got up this morning after a glorious extra hour of sleep, and there in my Eudora inbox is a note from Josh Morgan, co-founder of Intense Debate.

Intense Debate is another blog comment thingy, similar to DISQUS. Josh had seen my post about DISQUS last night, and wanted me to know about his product.

So, I checked it out. And I decided to install it. And now it’s installed.

Leave me a comment!

I’ll be discussing DISQUS and Intense Debate in an audio comment on tomorrow’s episode of For Immediate Release (if Shel and Neville decide to include it.)

But first an open message to Josh and his team:

Dear Josh and Team,

Hey, it must have been easy to monitor DISQUS on the blogosphere. Not many false positives among the Google Alerts. But “Intense Debate”? Good luck monitoring that.

Best to you all,

Max

DISQUS adds qontinuity where it was much missing.

Go check out Scripting News where Winer is testing it out.

DISQUS adds nice commenting capabilities to blogs. Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and MovableType. Allows:

• readers to rate comments
• comments to be sorted by rating
• a comment to be specifically designated a reply to another comment
• comments to be threaded (a consequence of the last bullet)
• an RSS feed to be made just for one blog post and its comment stream, so that if it goes long you can easily keep following it (remember the incredibly long series of comments on O’Reily’s Blogger Code proposal? Or Kathy Sierra’s farewell? Each would’ve been better threaded and with its very own feed.)
• the thread to be subscribed to by email instead of RSS, for those who prefer
• a DISQUS user’s comments, no matter on how many blogs, to be aggregated in a single RSS feed. I.E. you can subscribe to my comment feed to read everything I say, all over the blogosphere.
• API access to the DISQUS back end.

I’m sure there are other goodies there I haven’t gotten to yet.

Whatever else I learn about it, I’m having a blast just commenting scripting.com. Winer’s been a hero of mine for years, but commenting his blog has been a pain. Now that it’s easy, and in the expectation it’ll be temporary, I’m cuttin’ loose, commenting every post he puts up.

I’ll try to get DISQUS working here tomorrow. No promises. I have a video to edit, an audio comment to record for FIR, and four blog posts queued up.

The first casualty in the war over water? Was it the guy in Sydney, or the truth?

Truth is the first casualty of war.

My fine Aussie friend Lee Hopkins has a slogan with which he ends the episodes of his podcast. “Communicate with passion!” he chirps.

Okay, Lee, I’m about to do just that.

Lee grabbed me with his short post this week, “There will be more blood shed yet.”

I knew that Lee would be paying attention. For many months he’s been noticing, out loud, Australian politicians’ state of denial over dwindling water supplies.

Is Australia’s drought part of a natural cycle or a symptom of AGW (anthropogenic global warming)? We can’t know for sure, but if warming continues and freak weather gets freakier, history’s verdict will most likely be that we, not unassisted nature, caused it.

Lee didn’t mention AGW, but as to violence, he is surely right. It has only begun.

Under nearly every scenario in which global warming kills people, we would be desperately naïve to think that all of those people will die without a fuss or a fight.

Climate change denial is the first act of the next great war (and I mean really great, war by comparison to which USA-on-Iraq is a mere mugging.) It’s a murdering of truth and a murdering of many, many people, of whom those already born probably make up only a small minority. Real skepticism is a fine thing and I respect it and practice it. But only a few points I’ve ever heard made by AGW deniers are honest skepticism; the greatest bulk by far are outright lies.

Being myself a skeptic, I even doubt whether Sydney’s lawn-watering killing is the first such event caused by climate change, if indeed that is what it is. But my best guess is that future history books will name it just that way. (In both respects: related to AGW, and the first murder thus related.)

Truth is also the last casualty of war.

Besides several hundred blog posts, my reading this week included Praise of Folly, by Desiderius Erasmus. This led me to read some literature about the man. I had known little about him except that he influenced the King James Bible. And that Luther called him “an eel whom only Christ can catch.”

In that literature, what struck me most is how little respect Erasmus gets in the Christian world.

The reason, I think, is that he simply refused to participate, on either side, in the Protestant schism.

Here’s what the online Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about him. I’ve emphasized the sentences I think are crucial.

Opinions concerning Erasmus will vary greatly. No one has defended him without reserve, his defects of character being too striking to make this possible. His vanity and egotism were boundless… he lacked straightforward speech and decision in just those moments when both were necessary. His religious ideal was entirely humanistic[:] reform of the Church on the basis of her traditional constitution, the introduction of humanistic “enlightenment” into ecclesiastical doctrine, without, however, breaking with Rome. … Devoid of any power of practical initiative he was constitutionally unfitted for a more active part in the violent religious movements of his day…

I believe what is actually meant here is that Erasmus’ profound pacifism was A Bad Thing. And make no mistake, Erasmus consistently opposed not only war, but the schism which would necessarily bring war with it.

Luther was spiteful, malevolent, and fond of violence. He took joy in the burning of synagogues and Anabaptists. (Erasmus opposed the killing of heretics.) Johann Eck, who opposed Luther after the publication of the 95 theses, was spiteful, malevolent, and fond of violence. His purpose in “debating” Luther was not to sort truth from falsehood, but to find some way of painting Luther into the heretic’s corner, where the full bludgeon of papal authority could be used against him.

For the occurrence of schism instead of reformation, Eck was as responsible as Luther was.

Meanwhile, Erasmus disagreed with Luther but refused to condemn him.

And while the motivations of Luther and Eck dominated both sides in the schism…

while Catholic and Lutheran vilified and killed each other…

while both sides gleefully murdered anyone who dared to live by true Christian convictions…

Erasmus simply tried to stay out of harm’s way long enough to finish a few scholarly projects, including a trustworthy translation of scripture.

The author of the quoted article believes, perhaps, that this desire demonstrates bad character. That Luther and Eck were true solid men and Erasmus wasn’t.

Even in reconciliation, the lying goes on.

The Catholic Encyclopedia was originally published in the seven years up to 1914. Yes, it’s old, and Catholic-Protestant reconciliation hadn’t gone very far in that day. But even now, when the two sides seek as much common ground as they can, who in this movement of unity is singing the praises of Erasmus?

After a bitter war, when the two sides reconcile, they still assume that what matters is the two sides. Catholic-Protestant reconciliation tends to riff on the theme “of course the other side was right in their way, from their point of view.” The two opposing points of view are now reconciled, but also validated.

Which is a great lie.

A better reconciliation would be of both sides to the truth. To the truth that they should never have been sides at war. The truth which would say “we were both wrong and Erasmus has chosen the better part.”

I’m reminded of an account I read some years ago of an early 20^th-century event. Some still-living veterans from both sides of the civil war got together and shook hands and adulated each other for their equal valor.

And there wasn’t a black face in the crowd. None had been invited.

War, born of lies, leads to a lying form of peace. One which says “My!, weren’t we both brave and principled, even if our principles were different!” Not a truthful peace, which would say, “In our thirst for a paltry mastery, we made pawns, we made non-persons, we made carrion of countless other souls whom God loves. May He forgive us. May we learn a better way and teach it to our children.”

In each such lying peace, the smiles and hugs and mutual congratulations are only dirt overlying the seeds of the next war.

The deniers of AGW count on a lying peace, even if the worst scenarios come about. They count on a forgiveness arising out of humanity’s perversity. Humanity’s way of paying attention to the power-wielders on the “sides” of a war, and ignoring the simply dead who never wanted to take a side but wanted to simply live.

Paying attention to global warming isn’t about saving the planet. The planet is a big wet rock. It will do fine even if we leave fewer than ten species to squirm their way out of the deuterordial soup.

No, it’s not about the planet.

It’s about all those other species.

But more…

it’s about our own species, the one that, rightfully, is dearest to us.

It’s about our great-grandchildren.

But more yet…

it’s about war, which God hates and we should, too…

And it’s about saving our souls.

Don’t. Don’t even think about it. Your life is too valuable. Don’t waste it, I beg you.

So, I was more than half right.

When I cornered Hugh at Tuesday’s geek dinner, he told me that while he’s not a great fan of Hunter S. Thompson, he really likes Ralph Steadman, the illustrator of Fear and Loathing. Which after all was what I really had in mind.

I enjoyed Hugh’s talk about his work in his video with Scoble.

We hear lots about how to hire smart, less about how to fire.

But today, Seth Godin and Jim Stroup give us a perfectly matched pair of stories about just that. Please read both; each story strengthens the other in a big way.

A bit more about that code of ethics thing (see my last post).

One of the reasons it’s dangerous to ascribe motives to another person is that it’s really hard for any of us to understand motives, our own or anyone else’s.

Let’s go down that path, tricky as it is, and talk about the motivations that might have been at work last week as the House of Representatives considered the Free Flow of Information Act.

To cut to the chase: before passing the bill, the house watered down the protections afforded journalists who shield their sources.

Declan McCullagh has laid out the steps by which the language was modified as the bill was considered. The crucial point here (and how this relates to my last post on Citizen Journalism Ethics) is that the bill managed to exclude most bloggers from its protections. Here’s the final language:

The term “covered person” means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.

In other words, not I nor (probably) you.

Why does money make a difference? Why should those who get paid to do journalism be afforded protection that you and I don’t have?

Now perhaps I’m going to shock you by suggesting there may have been a perfectly good and sound motive at work here. Plenty of others have mentioned the crasser motives that may be at work (read the comments to Declan’s post.)

But what if… what if the legislators used money as a proxy for something else? For example, a code of ethics?

I’ll clarify. Much as they love to make laws which restrict people’s freedoms, legislators also have some grasp of the notion that those who self-police don’t need to be policed by others.

But how can we identify those who self-police? Well, generally it’s done by seeing that they belong to a group which collectively self-polices. And in the case of journalism, that would be professional journalists, who have a code of ethics, and not bloggers, who don’t.

That journalists might often ignore their own codes of ethics is not to the point. The legislators must operate under the assumption that the codes are largely observed, even if not universally. If they’d believed that such professional codes were worthless, they’d have been much more likely to treat professionals as they’ve treated bloggers.

Now comes the question that has to do with thoughcraft: If the House had meant ”professionals should be protected because they have a code of ethics which protects the rest of us from their behaving like scoundrels,” why didn’t they say so?

Well, indeed, some of them might have said so in their discussions; I haven’t read the record and just now I don’t intend to. But it’s just possible that that was what they meant even if they didn’t say so. And they didn’t say so because they knew, deep down, that to talk about journalistic ethics would open cans of worms none of them wanted to deal with.

Now what I am confident of is that there must have been some mention of bloggers in those discussions. And what I’m equally confident of is that the question of a code of ethics would have been very unlikely to come up at those moments.

Why? Because a code of ethics for bloggers is about as unthinkable among Representatives as it is among bloggers.

Here’s a snippet from chapter 10 of Thoughtcraft:

We are taught what to think by all the ways in which the community signals to us which ideas are in favor and which are not. Signaling may be very overt (”How dare you say that!?”) or less so, as when one’s statements are based on assumptions the group doesn’t share, and are consistently met with non-understanding. In many persons, these signals result in various thoughts being either “thinkable” or “unthinkable” in the context of the group.

Many of the reasons bloggers rejected the Bloggers’ Code of Conduct were intuitive. So much so, in fact, that non-bloggers, such as U.S. Representatives, might grasp them intuitively. So that, instead of explicitly naming the missing code of ethics as the reason for not protecting bloggers, the lawmakers instead chose a proxy—money, which makes a professional—which satisfied them. And which did so without opening the can of worms that lay in the question “So do journalists actually abide by a code of ethics?”

Kami Huyse is making me rethink the bloggers’ code of conduct. The idea of a code was put forward by Tim O’Reilly after Kathy Sierra decided to shut down her Creating Passionate Users blog due to harassment.

The Bloggers’ Code died not with a bang but a whimper, and I was happy to let it. But Kami has got me thinking about it again with her post on ethics among journalists and PR practitioners. The point of her post is that few in either group even read their respective codes of ethics. According to Kami, this is a Bad Thing.

But if journalists should be reading and abiding by their own code of ethics, and if bloggers are the new citizen journalists, then shouldn’t they be reading and abiding by their own code? And wouldn’t that involve having one?

O’Reilly’s draft code had a lot more to do with simple decent conduct than with our taking seriously our roles as journalists. But a code like his would have started us down that path, and maybe that’s where we need to go.

(The foregoing is part I, the simple part of this post. My next post will get a little trickier, going into the depths of what my Alpha Mind blog is all about.)

Aha! I think I’ve discovered one of the keys to Hugh’s more incomprehensible cartoons. Today he used the phrase “bad craziness,” then qualifies said craziness as being “most of it positive.” If I remember (and I have a nasty good memory), “bad craziness” is a caption or thought balloon or something in one of the original illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Come clean, Hugh! Fear and Loathing has admitted to keeping Hugh MacLeod in his back pocket. Will you admit to keeping Fear and Loathing in yours? Or at least in your brainpan? Sometimes the similarity between your cartoons and those in the book is scary. (For that matter, your ‘toons themselves are scary. But I love ‘em.)